A Lens Adaptor That Increases Speed

Nothing Short Of Amazing!

We Sony NEX camera owners don’t have tons of lens choices until you look at some of the options for adaptors. The Metabone’s Speed Booster is a pretty amazing device. It adapts Canon EF lenses to Sony AND increases your maximum aperture by 1 stop (hence its name).

It also preserves the focal length of full-frame lenses on APS-C cameras like the Sony NEX series. For a long time, shooters with APS-C size sensors in their cameras have been seeing longer focal lengths than what is inscribed on the lens. A 35mm lens turns out to be 56mm (if the crop factor is 1.6x), a 24mm lens turns out to be roughly 38mm, and so on. Your field of view shrinks because the sensor is smaller.

Metabone’s Speed Booster has a focal length multiplier of 0.71x. So for example, the Canon EF 85mm f/1.2L II lens becomes a 59mm f/0.9 lens on a Sony NEX camera, with increased sharpness. The faster F-stop allows for shallow depth-of-field and a lower ISO setting for decreased noise.

Using the Metabones Speed Booster, the image is focused onto a smaller area, and the entire field of view is preserved as if you were using a full-frame camera. Because the image is focused smaller, the light passing through becomes intensified, and that means your lens will receive about 1 stop of extra brightness. Like magic, your f/1.8 lens becomes an f/1.2 lens.

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